CruciformMe

In the movie Joe Versus the Volcano, Joe Banks has a miserable life. He’s a hypochondriac working a dehumanizing and dead-end job managing the catalogs at a company that proudly produces sexual prosthetics. Joe is having an even worse week. He is diagnosed with a terminal yet symptomless condition called a brain cloud. Then he is hired by a billionaire Samuel Harvey Graynamore to jump into a volcano to appease some islanders from whom Graynamore wants to buy a mineral needed for his super-conductors, the upside of this being that Joe receives an all-expenses-paid cruise to this island on a private yacht before he dies. To round out this week from hell, the yacht goes down in a terrible storm. He and Graynamore’s unconscious daughter, Patricia. are the only survivors.

One night, Joe is in the middle of the ocean after several days of floating aimlessly with the comatose Patricia, effectively alone on a makeshift raft created from his waterproof luggage. He looks at the full moon, which appears to be much larger than usual, reaches towards it and quietly says:

Dear God, whose name I do not know - thank you for my life. I forgot how BIG…. thank you. Thank you for my life.

He does not know the correct religion, who God is or even which god to pray to, but he realizes that there is something or someone that is in control of gracing him with the gift of his “miserable” life.

The third step is:

3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

The “as we understood him” part of AA and other recovery groups has fascinated me for awhile, mostly because it causes so much controversy. For some, the Twelve Steps just aren’t Christian enough, leading to spin-offs such as the eight steps of Celebrate Recovery. For these people, this kind of openness towards all belief systems is a weakness that cannot be overlooked and sometimes downright heretical.

The problem with programs (or churches …or people) that have a very defined picture of God is that there is little room for God to get any bigger. It’s safer because God can’t take over something in which we don’t let him be involved. Since we think we know who God is already, he will not grow and neither will we. Most of us change only when absolutely forced to by the circumstances of our lives. “As we understood him” grants us the freedom to not be stuck with one immovable picture of God our whole lives. In fact, the it assumes that our understanding now will be different from what we once “understood.”

I got to go to a twelve-step recovery meeting a few nights ago, in order to see one of my kids from Freedom pick up his 30-day chip (these are given at many intervals: 30 days, 90 days, 1 year; represents X days clean from drugs/alcohol/whatever). As each person received their chip, they were instructed to say who they were and how they did it. “A lot of help from my sponsor,” said one. “A whole lotta prayer,” said another. And one, who was re-establishing (starting his count over with a desire chip after a slip), said, “I just have to let God have every part of me.”

He knew that he would continue to flail around like what he had been doing so far unless something changed. What he’d been doing so far had not been working. Just to survive, he needed to grow in his relationship with his higher power. This is important because if he had turned his will to same God he had used before, nothing would change.

I don’t think it is a mistake that the step that involves turning our will to God also involves understanding that we cannot fully know that God. My knowledge is so minute compared to how large the universe is, let alone alone compared to the God who created it. As he helps me grow, however, my picture of him grows, too, until I finally realize that he is bigger than I will ever know, which is the best understanding for which I can ever hope.

In this way, our faith is sometimes like stumbling in a dark room until we realize it is not the lack of light but our own blindness that keeps us from being able to see. In this world, this concept is not the beginning of the path towards wisdom, it seems, but the destination. “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.”

What should the church look like as a result of this realization? Not very “Christian.”

It looks like people who aren’t so caught up in being right. Self-righteousness in the knowledge of the mind of God doesn’t exist because we know that we are no better off than those who are not as far along as we are. We know that the faithful life has its share of “Blessed Assurance,” but also its share of when “‘Tis Midnight and on Olive’s Brow,” when even those who know the most have trouble dealing with the way things play out. Knowing all of this, we go forward in the hope that perhaps in all of this unknowing we will find peace. Together, we seek truth without the belief that we can ever have a monopoly on it.

But first there are demons we need to deal with - step four.

Three nights a week, I provide respite care to an eighty-six-year-old man who lost one foot to diabetes. Tom is in a wheelchair, and though he tries hard, he’s almost completely helpless - he can’t cook for himself, he can’t clean himself, and he can’t even use the restroom by himself. When he first had his foot removed, he wanted to make sure he wasn’t a burden to anyone, so he chose to live in a nursing home.  Unfortunately, he was then severely neglected. He was left alone for large parts of the day, and they often missed giving him his medications.  Francis, his next-door neighbor, went to visit him after a couple weeks, but what she found was a incoherent, drooling shell of the person he had once been.  So she took him home and began caring for him herself, unwilling to lose him to poor care.

In Tuesdays With Morrie, Morrie is speaking with a reporter. He is dying, and to his surprise, this is news to some people. During the interview, he is asked what he fears most. “Well, one day,” he says, “Somebody else will have to wipe my ass.”

For a long time, I felt that becoming an adult was about trying to arrange my life so that I was dependent on no one.  “Being my own man,” so to speak.  One problem, though: I was always doomed to fail at this.  Some people have figured how much I like to do things myself and have made it their mission to make sure I take help, even when I don’t need it.  It happened this morning in the Highland office.  I sliced my thumb open with a pair of scissors, and when I asked Carla where the first aid kit was, she proceeded to get a big kick out of not letting me deal with it myself. (Note: Carla is secretly a sadist. Would it be too much to ask to use Neosporin instead of alcohol?) I was annoyed, but attempted to be grateful and graceful about it. 

It is hard to accept that we cannot do everything on our own, that no man is an island. There are different stages of life at which this lesson can be learned, but it’s never easy. Admitting dependence on anyone or anything is against every instinct we have.  This is why step 2 of the 12 Steps is that we:

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

At some point along our journey towards becoming the people God meant us to be, we have to admit to ourselves that self-reliance is only an illusion.  No matter how hard we try, we really can’t wipe our own metaphorical asses.  We are hopelessly dependent creatures by nature, even if we manage to fool those around us and ourselves into thinking that we have everything together.  We need God like we need air (he makes it anyway) because he brings order to our disorder.  When we don’t understand, we have to know that he does. We daily rely on his power, grace, and goodness before we ever get out the door.

I think it is significant that this second step focuses on the restoration of sanity.  Not stopping or starting a behavior that is bad or good for us - this is a probable result of sanity. Not looking good - we’d just be fooling others and ourselves. Not to give us control - we are powerless over the brokenness of this world (See step 1 for details).  We are looking to have a recalibrated perspective whenever we admit that we don’t do anything for ourselves.

With all my best efforts constantly striving to attain independence, it’s only recently that I’ve figured out that this is not the goal of my life.  I know that I can’t save myself, and while I’m glad that today I can breathe, bathe and dress by myself, there’s no guarantee about tomorrow.  In the meantime, I have to choose to look to God’s providence and direction for everything - step 3.

If foul language is a serious offense in your book, stop here. It’s not worth offending people with a bad word just because I’m finally breaking my month-long blog silence. I promise I’ll post again soon. I’ll admit that, much to my mother’s dismay, I have developed a certain liking of the words that our culture has warped into being “bad,” because they can add emphasis that nothing else can. Oh well, my blog.

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Last night, my friend Ernie and I made a late night run to Whataburger. As we neared the Orange W of Greasy Goodness, we both groaned as we saw that the line of cars went around the building. Accepting the wait, we decided to wait inside so we would burn less gas and inhale less fumes. As we entered and joined the also lengthy indoor line, the cashier was just greeting the next customer in a very loud and unorthodox, yet rather jovial, way.

“Welcome to Whataburger, where we’re screwin’ up all kinds of shit tonight.”

The restaurant was quiet for a moment, while people took in this outburst. It was the late-night crowd, though, so we all took it in good humor. The place that had formerly had the low hum of a burger joint at midnight now buzzed with laughter and comments. A guy in front of Ernie and myself turned and said, “That kinda makes you wonder what you’re gonna get, doesn’t it?” We all laughed harder.

Eventually, we made through and sat down with an orange number tent labeled 30 to wait for Ernie’s food. I stuck with a drink - they don’t wear gloves when they make your food at Whataburger and I’m sometimes convinced I have a mild form of OCD. As we waited, I wondered aloud if this was part of what the church is missing - total, brutal honesty. I proposed a new welcome for the church I work with: “Welcome to Freedom Fellowship, where we’re screwin’ up all kinds of shit!”

This goes into my ongoing idea of church as a twelve step program, which I’ll continue to post on. This is the first step: universal confession or “Admiting that you have a problem.” Even better is the original wording that AA uses:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

Powerless. Just as alcoholics feel powerless over alcohol, just as the cashier expressed powerlessness over the shortcomings of herself and the establishment, so are we helpless when it comes to our bondage to decay and sin. “All have sinned,” and all that.

Think about what actually believing this would change about your church-going experience: No longer would there be distinctions between those who seem to have it all together and those who can’t even pretend anymore. Whether we’re drunkards, whores, liars, fags or anything else, we would accept that we all stand equal before God and each other. We’ve all screwed up and we’re all screwin’ up. No matter how far along we are in the healing process, we are all still in “recovery.” This is where all can find our belonging - in the admission of not doing right, not in the insistence that we are doing right.

Church then becomes as unpredictable and imperfect as we are, a place where we can freely and unashamedly admit weakness, because we actually believe that His power is made perfect in it. In true Ragamuffin spirit, mistakes are accepted and embraced jovially, because we know and are confident in what God has done in us and in what he can do in the world. But that’s step 2.